Mastodon Explained
mastodon.ie
mastodon.ie
They sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked.
Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.
Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you.
I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”.
No thanks.
It was a more civilized time.
Today, server admins ban other servers for random issues. Users do not use the built-in killfile-esque blocking method, but instead go and complain to server admins (who then are incentivized to use massive action against other servers). This obviously is not an environment that will lead to societal harmony.
The end result however is what you'd expect and the experience on those instances are very different from what you see on the more mainstream ones, and most people wouldn't like it.
Some of the "free speech", "low-moderation" instances have self-policing communities. Others are full of neo-nazis. Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol. They are not all the same.
If you feel harassed by an user, filter that user. If you feel harassed by every single account on an instance, filter that instance for yourself (this option currently does not seem to exist in Mastodon). But do not go crying to our admin and deny me, who happens to be on the same server as you and is semi-ok with some of the folks on that other server the ability to interact with them.
This is creating filter bubbles, your users will at first love the friendlyness and fluff, but it also is exactly what led to the right-wing successes we've seen all over the world in the last few years. Filter bubbles destroy democratic societies.
> Yet others are run by bigots and ban anyone who objects to the hate and vitriol.
You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control? Now you got an instance in which there are no more discussions, only self-assuring and groupthink, and which will slowly become more radicalised. If filtering was strictly an user's issue, other users may have seen the objection to hate and vitriol (which often starts underhanded), and have had another view.
By the way, that is true no matter which political fringe a server admin belongs to: I know a Mastodon instance on which some users become increasingly radicalised against car owners right now, to the point where mass executions are being normalised by joking about them. Guess what happens when you try to become a voice for reason... But are ALL of them just evil, unredeemable beings that need to be banned from talking? Should my Mastodon admin block that instance for spreading hate and vitriol, even though the majority still talks about other things? Obviously, that's a silly idea.
Here's another way to look at it: Our instance has moderation policies. You chose that instance in part because of those moderation policies, just as I did. Those moderation policies are there so we can interact with each other with the peace of mind that we're not going to have, say, child sexual abuse imagery DM'd to us.
Then an instance comes along with a few hundred follow bots that do that. So, after a few reports, our instance admin defederates from the instance.
If you don't like this, you're perfectly welcome to go to another instance, with different federation policies. Thanks to federation, you can do this and still stay in contact with me! It's a win-win!
> You see the dangers of giving admins that level of control?
No, not really. Those people are probably always going to exist. Honestly, much as I hate Nazis, if they're over there doing their thing, and not trying to harass or murder me and my friends, I'm happy just to let them do that. It's just a website; it's not like their kids won't have external influences and be able to figure out that, hey, Nazism is actually bad.
Not saying it's good or bad, just that it isn't a dichotomy between Mastodon restricting things or centralized systems that don't.
For example, on my silly hobby sites I provide all bots a status 200 for all GET and POST requests and just send them to a dummy virtual host to let them play in the sandbox for years on end. If they even once looked at the output they would see my silly ASCII art.
Some may be curious about search engines, but since I only allow HTTP/2.0, only bing can even connect with my site and robots.txt tells them to go away.
In NGinx:
error_page 404 500 501 502 503 504 =200 /ram/e.txt;
You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw.
https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us...
In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues.
If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
I would prefer to use an instance that has no control over who I can follow. As an added benefit, this instance wouldn’t have to fully federate with every instance I follow users from, so wouldn’t add all updates to the federated feed.
This way the instance would only be responsible for user identities but would not have much control over who its users can follow. I still don’t fully understand why Mastodon did not choose this design.
edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?
Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical.
Where do people get these ideas?
It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse.
The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic.
The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.
Dystopian would be dictating that everyone operates the software they choose to run using their own time and resources in the same exact way.
Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't.
Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is.
Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.At any rate, mastodon is a web app, not an IM client. No one who's ever raised this has even begun to explain how you could work e2e into something like it. Certainly no other microblogging platform has e2e anything, because that's not actually a thing that makes sense.
No for micro-blogging, but Mastodon supports direct messaging, and if you support direct messaging, you should support end-to-end.
> If you don't own the key exchange ...
Sure, but I trust https://letsencrypt.org/ more than I trust some random running a server.
No other microblogging service with DM support has e2e anything. Because they're websites. To have meaningful e2e you need to have key exchange and device keys, and if you have a website you can look at your DMs on then the website has to have a key. If the website has a key the owner of the website can look at your DMs. This is just fundamental to hosted web services, and it's why if you use icloud messaging with imessage you're no longer guaranteed e2e, and why signal just doesn't even have a website for you to use.
> Sure, but I trust https://letsencrypt.org/ more than I trust some random running a server.
LE has nothing to do with this? The key exchange I'm talking about is the end keys. User keys. LE doesn't provide those. For e2e IM systems a server has to manage user/device:key mappings, and are a central point of trust. They can potentially inject a "listening key" into your recipient list without you knowing and tap you or even impersonate you (but only in a forward way).
E2E is not a panacea, but it's also largely irrelevant to websites.
This is the thing about this argument: Either you trust your instance admins or not. If they promise you e2e and you don't trust them, you should rightly look at that as snakeoil.
You probably want a CA signing the public keys that you store on the site.
> They can potentially inject a "listening key"
You mean a MITM attack? Isn't that the reason for certificate authorities?
What I'm suggesting is that the same certificate infrastructure that is used to secure the connection between a server and a client could also be used to secure the connections between users.
There's nothing specific to HTTPS about CAs and trust chains.
It means that weak keys are a problem, but that's been the case since the dawn of time.
You might be surprised to discover that you're still trusting an instance admin.
It does improve some things, potentially, in terms of intermediaries being able to read things, but there are a lot of things that are still reliant on trusting your admin, or are outright unclear how they'll work in practice.
That said, I take back that "no one has begun to explain..." - they've begun. But so far they've kinda just thrown some well established protocols at it but not done much to explain how it really helps the "trust your admin" problem.
Not saying that that's what happens on Mastodon instances, I don't know enough about it's operation to comment.
Mastodon has actually done some work towards that but I don't think it's useable yet, see https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/13820
The only real issue with this wrt Twitter is that such failure of their internal employee auth allows malicious attackers to access DMs as well: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/22/twitter-admits-hackers-acc...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extrac...
I'd expect there to be many Facebookers who weren't caught, and I'd expect the same to be true of Twitter.
It seems like Mastodon assumes that misbehaving nodes will be cut off and just ignored by well-behaved ones - but that assumes that abuse is detectable and that standards of behavior will be enforced even if it means cutting off potentially large communities.
Yeah, I guess secure scuttlebutt comes to mind? But it's kinda it's own thing, notably with it's own scaling issues when it comes to widespread use.
Signal?
A de novo Eris-free network?
Most Mastodon instance are hosted by individuals. Granted, I would assume most people are hosting the service with good faith, but there is no binding way to ensure that. With Twitter, doing something feral will (at least was possible to bring) doom to the company and it's investment, which is far bigger balancing factor than just someone's honesty.
I'm not promoting Twitter here, but for Mastodon, something needs to be done to protect the integrity of the content posted, so the admin cannot modify it easily (moderation can still be done through deletion).
"Admins of <website> can read data on <website>" is just a tautology. It's true of everything you use on the internet where you don't own the server, and even then it's dubious.
If people don't get that about mastodon they probably don't get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD...
[note: Edited <service> to <website> above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we're talking about websites here - a website can't have "e2e" encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y'all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]
Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.
having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence.
i made no argument about the absolute merit of twitter vs the fediverse. this is simply a downside of small communities that people excitedly migrating to the fediverse with little understanding of how it works or experience with its predecessors will soon run into—twitter is neutral ground, on mastodon you might be arguing with the instance admin's friend and find yourself retaliated against. anyone who used a forum or IRC in the 90's/00's knows what i'm talking about.
As for:
> they'd need to evade internal checks (which, however weak they are, are infinitely stronger than the average fediverse instance).
Did you watch Mudge's testemony? Even if Musk wants to, it'll take a total re-org to get a semblance of security at Twitter, by the sound of it...
Mudge Twitter whistleblower testimony [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32824504
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/data-security-at-r...
I agree they're not equivalent.
One is a small harm guaranteed to be perpetrated every day against every single person using Twitter, numbering in the hundreds of millions of people, largely without those people knowing or consenting to it.
The other is a large harm sometimes inflicted on a small number of people, and when it does happen is isolated to a small community where people can find out about it and act on that knowledge how they see fit.
I've been around a long time. I've seen power abused on irc and forums and even small social networks. To me, the idea that we need supposedly benevolent megacorporations to keep us from doing harm to each other is a repulsive idea, far and away above "my instance admin might read something I wrote on their server."
If we've forgotten how to exist in community with each other, we should relearn that skill.
Huh? This is certainly not true for Signal and Matrix, heck even whatsapp and telegram sounds better than some random instance operator.
That said, truly private messages aren't always necessary, as long as the platform is crystal clear about this.
This might be less true for matrix, since you could in theory be using an open source client where you have somehow guaranteed it will alert you to an attempt to add an unwanted device key to your e2e chat, but on signal you're running a binary you didn't compile against a service you can't see.
I don't think you shouldn't trust them. But you are doing so to some extent.
When sending a DM on Mastodon, there is literally a message that pops up saying: "Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon."
And I would certainly assume that in 2022, any service would be built using encryption for the parts that are private, and aren't DM's private? Why would admins be able to read them? Is there a justification for that?
I'm not sure why you would assume that? It's not something you run on your computer, it's still a website (or set of websites). Admins of your email can also read your email, if they want, and even with gmail in the mix it's probably one of the most "federated" systems ever built.
> I would certainly assume that in 2022 it would built using encryption for the parts that are private, and aren't DM's private? Why would admins be able to read them? Is there a justification for that?
They could potentially be encrypted at rest, in the database, but that doesn't really help much. The owner of the site would have the keys to decrypt them, and on smaller sites it's very unlikely that there'd be any real chain of custody involved.
If you've ever sent a DM on a forum did you think that was encrypted? It wasn't. Or twitter or facebook for that matter. It's not really practical for any data stored on a central server to be encrypted in a way that irrevocably prevents the owner of the service from accessing it.
The whole assumption here is that Mastodon is supposed to be better than those, right? Or else why are we switching? Twitter is centralized and can read all your stuff and censor it too. So isn't the point that Mastodon isn't and can't do those bad things?
We expect WhatsApp and iMessage to provide E2EE. Similarly open-source Signal and Telegram are encrypted. So why wouldn't you assume another high-profile open source project isn't adopting those same best practices for the private-messages part of it?
Here are the ways mastodon is better than twitter:
- It can't be bought by a billionaire man baby
- It can't be coerced into hosting awful people because they drive revenue
- It doesn't require advertising in order to continue existing
- Because of that I'm not being endlessly datamined by adtech every moment I'm using it.
- It can't die because one website goes down, and everyone on it doesn't experience awful performance just because one instance is falling over.
- If I don't like the admins of the instance I'm on, I can move to another instance and bring much of my data with me without having to exfiltrate it with tools that violate the TOS.
- I can use whatever clients I like with it and I never have to worry about the company deciding it doesn't like third party apps and killing them slowly with api rate limits.
There are also a lot of ways it's worse than twitter, though they're mostly along the lines of "some of my friends aren't on it". Things don't have to be "better in every way" than other things to be "better for me (or you)". There are always tradeoffs.
Re. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and iMessage are all apps you run on your phone. And if you can read the messages on them from a website (as you can if you turn on a feature for imessage), then the admins of the service also have access to your messages.
Again, we're talking about a website here.
Not true. Web clients for Matrix are open source, and you can self host them if you are afraid of the default host trying to inject spyware to the page
This is why services like Matrix and Signal open source their client. Because for security minded people, securing the client is much easier than securing the server.
Decentralisation is about control: the Signal admins could shut down the server and kill the service. For Mastoson, if you stop one server, the others still work.
Use e2ee messengers (like Signal) for DMs, use Mastodon (or whatever you want) for public posts.
I know yahoo employees read email, I got my account back once by telling them recent subject lines.
This does rely on you trusting Google to implement and use these systems. The question is whether you trust a major tech company or whatever Mastodon server owner more to not peek at your DMs.
Mastodon is software. It implements the ActivityPub protocol. People run Mastodon instances of their own to connect to other ActivityPub systems. There are other ActivityPub implementations, Mastodon is just one. It's not a platform like Twitter any more than WordPress is like the NYTimes.
It's possible that some concepts or tools can't be simplified or there's no point. Try explaining Webpack to an end-user. Such categories of things exist, in which case they are not products but components of other products. If Mastodon can't be understood simply, then it will only catch on with those who understand complexity, and be used in a product that is itself simple.
Mastodon is not that hard to understand. It's just not Twitter. It's not meant to be a 1-to-1 replacement for Twitter, but people keep trying to compare it to Twitter and then acting out like they're all upset because they don't find everything they're looking for in the thing.
If "Mastodon replace Twitter" is a thing, it will mostly be in the sense that people will be using their time differently, not that they'll be doing the same things as they do on Twitter. You're not going to "build a brand" on Mastodon. You're not going to make a name for yourself posting "dank memes". You're not going to get a chance to show off your "sick dunks" to your followers.
I think it's weird that people keep calling Twitter a "public square", but if that's how they want to think of Twitter, that's not at all Mastodon.
What is Twitter, actually? It's an advertising platform. It carrots people with celebrities and sticks them with promoted tweets. Along the way, some people find they can keep up with their friends, colleagues, and industry acquaintances through the thing.
Mastodon is just about the last thing.
Every time a twitter thread gets posted on HN, there's at least one comment on how difficult it is to read it, for one reason or another.
The threading mechanics of twitter took me a non-trivial amount of time to get my head around.
"You visit a website (or install an app) and you create an account with an email address and password" is something the average person is used to. The UX will be confusing at first - there are new concepts to learn. People will figure it out.
Even if some do, most of those will run into a tiny random roadblock and will give up.
Nothing as "techy" as Mastodon or the one you mentioned will be adopted at the scale of Twitter.
So geeks explain the geeky benefits, which are substantial, but virtually no non-geeks care about.
1. What “rights”, dude? The right to sign up to an instance? Anyone can. And all those instances have different rules, different instances they federate to, etc.
2. Who do you think works at the EC if not people?
3. What does the ccp or trump have to do with this?
4. Do you realise how insane it is to even ban individuals because they work in politics? Or because of where they work in general? Does your ban apply if they left their position? Does it apply to congresspeople? Mayors? Neighbourhood watch? Any government employee? If yes then teachers too yes? What about other countries political systems?
I… don’t know why I’m even entertaining your post.
They may also have created an account before their instance was live, but their posts should all be from their instance now so if you don't want to see it you can just block the EU instance
The EU instance has been nice, and I'm following several of their accounts, and they're mostly posting policy information as well as updates on various programs, but I can't expect every singe organisational account to be similarly nice. Especially if new ones arrive that post much more controversial content.
There is a mastodon fork called Hometown, that gives the local timeline a higher importance, but I haven't used, I don't know the details.
What if I started my own server, just for me to manage my own data? What would "local timeline" look like then?
I always wondered if the expectation could be flipped to expect the frontend client to fetch the majority of content remotely from the followees' servers on the fly. The architecture is so complex in a federated scenario though that could be a total mess or not even technically feasible at all.
This is not a new problem. Shared spam lists and block lists are already emerging on mastodon, matrix, and other decentralized systems too.
Working dynamic spam/block list solutions at scale that are capable enough to actually erase the issue are a hand wavey future potential solution, whereas the tidal wave of content exceeding the ability of instance owners to moderate is a very real very today problem.
I think what's actually happening on the ground is instance owners slap on some instance block list of the worst offenders and turn a blind eye hoping there's nothing too bad hidden in the mountain of media they have cached, or they just hope nobody starts caring enough to look. That might work fine for a while but I don't think this problem is going away.
If anyone user of your email users gets on a spam list for illegal content, then it gets cached on your servers. Or a shell user simply uploads pirated movies.
This is a harsh reality well known to anyone who provides any public internet services. There is illegal content embedded in every blockchain, ipfs, and freenet node, and you cannot easily detect or censor it.
Some people will inevitably do disgusting or illegal things with all public internet resources at some point, but we absolutely cannot let such individuals discourage small community hosting which is vital for the survival of the free internet.
Decentralized services will always be abused to share CSAM but paradoxically are our only practical defense against giant surveillance capitalism corporations that we -know- are manipulating and selling the behavior of live children at massive scale today.
It's the reason Twitter isn't liable when someone uses it to send death threats to another person.
I only see things from people I follow. It is perfectly valid to use Mastodon like an RSS reader.
And instead of peddling hypotheticals about what your instance will/won't do, it would benefit you to make an account on one who has admins that will listen to your pleas or have similar inclinations towards content as you.
I tried Mastodon about two or three years ago; I used the largest instance I could find that claimed not to allow Adult content, but which still relayed other instances. I was shown pornographic content as soon as I logged in; some of it illegal in my country.
So I tried another instance that made similar claims. Same problem.
Maybe it's better now. Maybe it's no longer awash in loli hentai or cartoon beastiality.
I tend to recommend people find a small server with frienda and friends of friends if they want a public feed they can trust. Or simply follow people they trust to not post illegal content and ignore the firehose. That is what I do. Mastodon is basically an RSS reader for me.
Here is the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it doesn't look very complex.
On the one I can still login there is no one on it.
Mastadon is NOT a replacement for twitter in its current form. I actually cant tell you what it is.
But the text on this story is pretty close... just unintelligent gobblygook.
There's overlap between gaming and crypto and politics and identity. You can select specific people to follow from the #gaming results, so you concentrate on just what you want to see. Alternatively you can mute specific phrases to not see for example crypto. But don't expect people won't post about what they are interested in. People post for themselves and their interests, not for your enjoyment.
If you post about topic X and tag tens of unrelated topics it means you are no longer posting for yourself but your pushing a narrative. Stop. I dont care nor does the world care when they search for … #game.
No. They either don't want to or they want to spam.
> Why does everyone have to push their little agenda on everyone else?
You realise the irony here about you pushing your agenda about how other people should communicate, right? (if it's actually spam and you're using an instance which doesn't allow it, you can report it)
On the other hand, right now I follow only a few dozen accounts on Mastodon and I'm already drowning in irrelevant posts. It can at best be a glorified group chat.
On Twitter I just follow say 100 people and my client shows me their posts in chronological order and nothing else, with no ads.
If a feed tried to algorithmically insert a post I’d stop using that service in a hurry.
What I have seen from mastodon is that there is such a feed available so by the look of it, so far so good.
Federation is not the answer ultimately because centralization is how money is made. It’s also how the world works, but with certain expectations based on context.
Mastodon is like Linux on the desktop - it won’t work for most people.
Don't you threaten me with a good time!
Assumptions for this to be true:
- Windows and MacOS are a UX champions and most people can use them without any issues. (Not objectively true)
- People will be unable to comprehend GUIs like Gnome or KDE. (Not objectively true)
- Linux Desktop is incapable of doing things other Operating Systems are doing. (Not objectively true)
- Linux Desktop is based on a rigid idea and represents unusable software. (Couldn't be more wrong)
- Linux cannot be used for consumer use. (Again false, Google Chromebooks)
I don't even get how you're comparing Mastodon to Linux Desktop. Linux Desktop is functional, great for everyone who doesn't have an exclusive bias against open soruce software. Mastodon is FOSS, that's the only similarity.
Anybody who tells me that Linux distros like ZorinOS "won't work for most people" is either lying to themselves or being ignorant on purpose.
I am, my whole family is, my friends are. I don't see why I would choose to use a bloatware OS just because most people who don't know any better are using it.
Turns out, better software can replace Windows and give you a better experience, crazy I know.
The population of linux desktop users is nonzero but it is very small compared to the overall population of desktop users.
The original comment says: "it won’t work for most people", not "Most people don't use it".
Until then.................
Forums can be federated on the backend with database replication or LDAP which is also basically database replication. I suppose tooling could be created to manage LDAP branches so that people could replicate sub-sets of data read-only and some sub-sets read-write. I know I just made some admins heave a bit. Using one of the now-sanctioned Russian forks of OpenLDAP ReOpenLDAP [1] the federation could scale to several million users so at some point that code would have to evolve again to reach Twitter scale. What is their active user count?
Some IRC daemons can also use LDAP for identity. No idea if Matrix can support LDAP.
We need open source alternatives like Mastodon. But it is difficult to match the ease of use and network effect of current Big Tech. Federation for example makes it so that downloading 50 avatars from 50 different sites much slower than if they were all stored om central site.
For me personally, I have spent around 10 years and reinvested $1 million of our revenues to build this open source platform, which I think will help liberate people from privately owned Big Tech platgorms the way Web 1.0 helped liberate them from AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, MiniTel etc. and opened up new business models like Software As a Service and E-Commerce.
All the big companies, from PayPal to EBay, Google, Facebook, Amazon, only became possible because the Web was open and permissionless. AOL wouldn’t allow any of these business models to permanently be built on top of it (keyword: Facebook LOL).
Web 1.0 has a hugely adopted open source solution: Wordpress. NYTimes was one of the first investors. To publish something, people can choose from a free market of hosting companies, and plugin developers can sell directly to them, and no one can get deplatformed.
But for Web 2.0, I’m sorry but Mastodon and Matrix are not at the level consumers expect after being spoiled by Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, etc. That’s why we built Qbix… it’s supposed to be an open source alternative that lets you assemble your own community apps, if you want you can quickly stand up an alternative to what Zuck and Elon run:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
If you want to play around with it, it’s free to use. The platform is ready for use but needs a lot more tutorials and needs to be packaged for hosting companies… ultimately the goal is to incorporate micropayments:
If you’re interested, here is more on why it’s needed:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Edit: 4 downvotes in 4 minutes. That’s not enough time to even read the comment or look thru the link, let alone try it. Why such a vehement response to what is essentially free software, which is intended to help humanity? Mastodon and Matrix are in the same category… I would definitely appreciate any TEXT accompanying the downvotes, so that I can learn what you are thinking.
“QBUX is currently an ERC-20 token running on the Ethereum protocol. In the future, versions of QBUX running on other protocols may be developed, exchangeable 1-1 with the current QBUX token.”
Maybe you’re not willing to cop to it being “crypto” but it’s in essence the same.
The QBUX ecosystem is something that is planned for 2024, to denominate micropayments between sites, if they choose to pay each other for content. For example, monetizing open source plugins, digital content, journalism, user attention, and so on. Right now, the Web ad-supported model is broken, as the Ecosystem page explains. Qbix does plan to have sites (not people) settle balances with each other in something eventually. For micropayments between sites to be possible, there has to be a unit of account.
There are a few other things that immediately put me off as well, though they may be just wording/messaging. Let me dissect just half of the first sentence from https://github.com/Qbix/Platform, and what springs to mind reading it:
> Our company spent 10 years building a decentralized Social Operating System for the web
Who is the nameless "Our company"? Even if we know who they are, building on open source projects controlled by a single company is often a bad idea. How did you spend 10 years on this? Is it the open-sourced corpse of a failed commercial endeavour? Also bad to rely on. Or is it new? Most people that spend 10 years building something in private with no users end up building the wrong thing. "Decentralised" may be true, but screams "trendy buzzword". "Social Operating System" doesn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense. "Operating System for the web", oh, so it's like Linux or FreeBSD, or maybe WASI? How is that social or web-specific? No, it's not like that at all; reading a bit further shows that it's not anything like an operating system (AFAICT), and is actually a web framework (I think?).
There are plenty of other things that look like warning signs on that page too.
These immediate first impressions together with the apparently off-topic self-promotion of your first comment explain the down votes. (For the record, I upvoted.)
Please tell me, what software would you use today to do all that?
> "Social Operating System" doesn't make sense
It even defines it right there under https://qbix.com/platform ... what social applications are. Did you see the video, or really anything?
> "Who is the nameless Our Company"?
Qbix Inc. The company behind https://qbix.com -- it's right on the site.
Automattic is behind Wordpress. No, it's not a corpse of a failed commercial endeavor. NGinX took 10 years before it was commercialized. MySQL took 7. And commercializing it didn't really add much value to it... MySQL was simply forked to MariaDB. But both NGiNX and MySQL were in fact "controlled" by one entity for quite a while, before they became big. This is normal.
What are the other things that look like warning signs? And why did you not look at anything besides "QBUX"?
I understand what social applications are, what operating systems are, and what web frameworks are. I can't see anything resembling an operating system on any Qbix page I've looked at, but I do see things like a web framework, which is what you call it in some places. I've now watched the video - I think you should put Qbix's capabilities of identity sharing and friends but not websites knowing your private info in text form up the top, as not many people will watch a 7 minute video to figure out what something is (since that feature seems kind of neat and unusual).
I think the GitHub page should mention that the company is also named Qbix, as that's kind of confusing.
Some other things I interpreted as warning signs on the GitHub page are:
- The overly-ambitious goals like "We aim to do to Facebook and Google what the Web did to AOL and CompuServe" - almost no one stating goals like that will achieve them.
- The screenshots are mostly American politics, which is to many people the worst aspect of social media, so quite off-putting.
- "Build once, run everywhere". Developers have heard that before, and it's never been correct before, so seems dubious now.
- In several places there seems to be a lack of distinction between the open source software platform, and the online platform Qbix runs (controls?), e.g. "If your app turns out to be very useful, we can discuss giving it a head start by making it available to everyone on our platform.". I can't tell if it's actually the case, but that makes you sound like gatekeepers in some sense; isn't an app I make already available to everyone?
Those are good examples of open source projects controlled by a single company, but people using them are running the software on their own systems, isolated from the company. Qbix the software sounds more entangled with Qbix the company. I've now read a whole lot more, but I still don't really understand.
I found some broken links on https://qbix.com/platform, on the left "For Developers" etc. don't do anything when I click.
But it doesn't really matter. You asked why people were downvoting.
And the reputation of cryptocurrency has sunk so low that a lot of people aren't going to stick to see exactly what a product is. If they get even a hint that something might be cryptocurrency adjunct, they leave.
No, it's not, though. In the future it might be cryptocurrency-related. But currently it is not.
I'm sorry that you don't stick around to read 99% of the site that doesn't mention cryptocurrency, but see something that sort of seems like cryptocurrency and leave. That sounds like the attitude of many on HN to other nitpicks (e.g. comic sans, maybe, used somewhere... and then the person announces they stopped looking at that point)
Saying that, my guess is that you are being downvoted for self-promotion.
Finally. Someone who shares the same viewpoint as myself. thank you.
That's actually a very good idea!
I think that you just mean "platforms" ? They are indeed bad, being closed and centralized... ("protocols, not platforms" !) not sure that you want to associate yourself semantically with them ?
Qbix supports: events, videoconferencing, livestreaming, calling into the show, group reservations, paying for them, earning credits, sharing content, collaborating on various files, scheduling team meetings, dating, making appointments, teaching students, and more.
That's what Web 2.0 is
Four years ago I started a Web 3.0 company called intercoin.org -- with the same approach. It also has a free open-source set of applications
https://intercoin.org/applications
But that one is "cryptocurrency-related" so I'm sure people on HN will automatically think it's a scam lol. Even though you can just take the code and do whatever you want with it.
However we also need a public square online. One where anyone may speak and anyone may respond and challenge the ideas. A place where anyone can put their claims on the record. It's not a place for sharing holiday photos. It is a place for public figures, journalists and politicians. Twitter has already been moving out of this space with it's various 'snowflake protection' policies and I hope Mr. Musk can restore this public square and strengthen it.
This is just a purely imaginary space which for some reason even very smart people keep bringing up.
Why? What is this notion based on? A global public square never existed in the history of our species, why do we keep bringing up the idea of a public square as something completely reasonable?
It's kind of like pointing at an institution run by edgy, lonely teenagers and asking, "How is that working so far as a ${institution_type}?"
My argument is that there is a place online where anyone can go and express an idea and challenge ideas of other’s. That place is (among others) 4chan. It’s not some obscure personal blog, it’s a large and influential platform. Is it working as a public square? Are you using it to challenge ideas you disagree with?
If someone says something dumb you call them a slur and move on. So yeah, actually.
On the other hand, a global neutral public square where all ideas can be expressed and challenged is just not feasible in any meaningful way.
Twitter really is a public square in the true sense of the term.
Smaller distinct places that iter-operate and have the same UI for consistent UX seems strictly better for a public square.
It is in reality a Confediverse.
Edit: All Elon has to do is send out a Tweet with something to the effect of "The Left's alternative to Twitter is Mastodon a Confederacy. Now that's what I call ironic." and watch them lose their minds.
I think it would be useful if you could explain the anatomy of such a term?
My reading [1] on the matter indicates that it can't be defined as a fediverse because the content is not owned by individual posters, indeed if I were to post something on a mastodon instance, I do not retain sole ownership of the data - a moderator could delete it, and thus "censor" my opinions. But I question, is this a true critisism? And does federation require each client connected to a distributed node to in it's own right retain absolute sovereignty over the content posted on that federated instance?
Instances can block other instances. That's not a Federation. Instances can have other rules and allow other content. That's not a Federation.
Mastodon is a confederacy by definition.
Why would that be ironic? Apart from the most well-known historical example—I assume that's your reference—there's nothing about a confederation that's inherently 'anti-left', as far as I can tell. The European Union resembles a confederation.
> Apart from the most well-known historical example—I assume that's your reference
But that particular confederacy doesn't have a monopoly on the term.